XXXTentacion and Hip-Hop’s Moral Reckoning with Domestic Violence
XXXTentacion’s new album ? doesn’t resemble a traditional hip-hop album. For one thing, most of the songs don’t even sound like rap at all. The 20-year old Florida rapper, whose name is pronounced “ex-ex-ex tentación” but is known more commonly as X, frequently maneuvers between genres: he experiments with a hard-hitting East Coast flow on “infinity (888),” a melodic “trap” sound commonly found in Southern hip-hop on “$$$,” and even a moody, alternative rock sound on “NUMB.” Beyond the sound, though, the album’s content is also unusual. On ?, X struggles with depression and his own mental health demons and does not shy away from emotional rawness. On the album’s opening track, aptly-titled “Introduction (instructions),” X speaks without any musical accompaniment to explain that listening to the album is like “entering my mind, feeling my insanity, feeling my genius, my energy.” X further articulates that the album is intended to help his listeners negotiate their own emotional turmoil: “This album is far different, far more versatile, far more uplifting than the last. It’s something you can find comfort in, it’s very comforting.”
On practically every song, X reveals that his relentless depression stems from the destructive nature of his relationship with his now ex-girlfriend. He presents a narrative to his listeners that his girlfriend attempted to exploit their relationship for her own profit and left him in an emotionally-shattered state. On “ALONE, PART 3,” X openly expresses feelings of resentment and abandonment towards his ex-girlfriend:
Gave my love a piece of me
She put my heart beneath her feet
She turned and left I question, “What’s my worth?”
My worth, my worth.
In a masculine hip-hop culture, indications of emotional pain are few and far between. Rather, hip-hop artists usually present apathetic outward personas, emphasizing casual sex over an emotional connection with women. It is very uncommon for a hip-hop album to wrestle with mental health issues like ? does. Given the degree to which X exposes himself on the album, its tremendous success seems even more surprising. Using music-sharing platforms like Soundcloud, X has developed an intensely loyal fan base who have voraciously consumed his new music: ? is currently listed as the second-most successful album on the Billboard 200 after selling 131,000 copies in the first week. On the pop-culture website Genius, web pages of X’s lyrics amassed 6 million views since release, just 20 days ago.
While the style may break traditional norms for hip-hop albums, it is X’s troubled personal history that makes the success of ? so fascinating. Beginning in 2014 with a one-year stint in a juvenile detention center for a gun possession charge at 16-years-old, X has repeatedly faced criminal charges and run-ins with law enforcement. Following an alleged 2015 incident in his native Broward County, Florida, X was incarcerated for armed home invasion and aggravated battery with a firearm. On October 8th, 2016, X was arrested again and officially charged with aggravated battery of a pregnant woman, domestic battery by strangulation, false imprisonment, and witness-tampering after his ex-girlfriend made various domestic violence accusations against him. After appearing in court in December 2017, X was placed under house arrest. In late March, a Florida judge allowed his request to be released from house arrest to go on tour for this album.
Domestic violence of any kind is heinous and inexcusable. However, the victim’s recent testimonies have made the deeply sadistic nature of X’s alleged abuse available for the general public to reckon with. If you’re easily disturbed, consider skipping the following paragraph, but understand that the accusations against X are profoundly vile and gruesome.
With that in mind, it’s the ethical responsibility of fans to reckon with X’s alleged physical and psychological abuse. According to an extensive testimony obtained from the Miami public defender’s office, the woman moved in with the rapper in May 2016. Two weeks later, the woman reported that X slapped her and broke her iPhone 6s for complimenting a male friend’s jewelry. Later that day, X made the victim choose between a barbecue pitchfork and a barbecue cleaner that he was going to put inside her vagina. The woman “chose the fork. [X] told her to undress. He was lightly dragging the tool against her inner thigh when she passed out. He did not penetrate her with it.” The testimony depicts repeated violence after the incident with the two grilling implements. In the summer of 2016, the victim reported having hummed along to an unnamed featured artist on one of X’s songs during a car ride. When the two returned home, X “allegedly head-butted, punched, stomped, and kicked the woman” before threatening “to cut out her tongue.” With X spending time in prison for a separate aggravated battery arrest, the woman had sex with another man. Soon after X’s release, the two moved back in together, and the woman discovered she was pregnant. Shortly after, X “allegedly threatened to kill the woman and the unborn child…[he] then head-butted, punched, elbowed, and strangled the woman before threatening to kill her in the bathtub.”
Given the grotesque nature of the testimony, a central moral question arises: how can any reasonable person, in good conscience, continue to listen to X’s music? Are the accusations that have been levied against him — albeit they are still only accusations — not revolting enough to warrant extreme social scrutiny? On a surface level, however, the domestic violence accusations do not seem to have had any profound effect on X’s fans or the profitability of his image: in addition to his 23 million monthly listeners on Spotify, X signed a record deal with Capitol Music Group for an astounding figure of $6 million last October.
Considering his recent socio-cultural and economic successes, it’s clear that X’s fans see no intellectual challenge in separating the art on ? from the moral shortcomings of the artist. His fans consistently object to the inclusion of X’s reprehensible actions into society’s assessments of his artistic work. The argument in favor of separating the art from the artist is keenly articulated by Charles McGrath in his piece “Good Art, Bad People.” McGrath asserts that art occupies a morally-untouchable space. For him, the terms “goodness” and “badness” refer to fundamentally distinct concepts when describing human morality as they do when applied to art. For the artist, goodness and badness amount to a “moral quality or judgment.” However, this articulation of morality does not extend when the same terms are applied to descriptions of the art itself: “In the case of [one’s] art, goodness and badness are terms of aesthetic merit, to which morality does not apply.” To substantiate this distinction, McGrath invokes the German composer Richard Wagner, whose anti-Semitism is widely known. McGrath asserts that while Wagner’s beliefs may have been objectionable, his music remains morally-neutral: “Wagner did not compose a single note that is anti-Semitic.” It is therefore misguided, McGrath asserts, to apply the same moral condemnation one would levy on an unsettling musician as one would on the music itself.
For the most part, McGrath’s assertion seems reasonable. Wagner may have been a virulent anti-Semite, but his musical compositions — his greatest legacy — do not convey those ideologies. However, a significant limitation to McGrath’s argument rests on the assumption that the content of the art will be reasonably separable from the beliefs or behavior of the artist. Therein lies an essential shortcoming of McGrath’s argument: how ought we react to artists who include their vile moral behavior directly into their art? In the case of X, it is impossible to separate the art from the artist for this very reason. X describes his destructive relationship on virtually every song. More specifically, X establishes a deeply troubling claim: the accusations his girlfriend has levied against him are actually the original cause for his depression and mental health issues. On ?, X deliberately blurs the line between his suicidal thoughts with his previous relationship. Amazingly, X presents himself as the true victim, suffering as a result of false allegations that have been seriously damaging to his mental health. For example, on “Moonlight,” X implicitly denies the charges made against him by arguing that they were premeditated by his ex-girlfriend with malicious intent:
Knife in intestine
Takin’ shots at all your brethren, no
Feel like I’m damaged
Girl I know you fucking planned this.
On “NUMB,” X appears to blame her for all of his mental health issues:
And every single year
I’m drowning in my tears, I’m drowning in my tears again
I can’t seem to forget the pain you seem to give
The pain you seem to give, my friend.
On “SAD!” X even goes as far to say that his ex-girlfriend’s treatment of him, and his subsequent feeling of betrayal, have both led him to contemplate suicide:
Who am I? Someone that’s afraid to let go, uh
You decide if you’re ever gonna let me know (yeah)
Suicide if you ever try to let go, uh
I’m sad, I know, yeah, I’m sad, I know, yeah
I gave her everything
She took my heart and left me lonely.
Disturbingly, listeners don’t seem bothered. Rather, they seem to have rallied behind a controversial artist, even as his music blames a victim of domestic violence for the perpetrator’s depression and suicidal thoughts. Even as his tone shifts from emotionally wounded on certain tracks to violently resentful on others, X’s emphasis on his ex being the cause of his depression feels like a way to excuse his violence towards her. With this message serving as the thematic underpinning for the entire album, McGrath’s ability to separate Wagner’s anti-Semitism from music appears mute and far-removed. Indeed, X’s music is not able to be separated from the actions of which he’s been accused because, in many ways, his actions are his art. So then, the question becomes the following: what other factors are at play that keep a talented artist but a deeply flawed person like XXXTentacion both successful and culturally relevant? The answer appears to lie far deeper than simply whether or not his art contains references to his troubling actions. As we’ve seen, it unashamedly does. So what gives?
The answer begins within hip-hop itself. Socio-culturally, X is affirmed by a hip-hop culture born out of resistance to social authority that prioritizes an authentic voice over an ethical one. Writing for Vulture Magazine, Craig Jenkins provides a historical analysis of hip-hop culture that is essential to understand X’s surprising rise. To begin with, Jenkins examines the centrality of authenticity to successful hip-hop artists. For rappers, interactions with the law do not represent significant obstacles to career success. Citing slightly older examples, Jenkins explains how their respective reputations for selling drugs solidified the acclaim of both Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg in the ’90s. Similarly, “getting shot nine times transformed 50 Cent from neighborhood rabble-rouser into a spokesperson for the streets.” Within this framework, authenticity is essential: for a hip-hop artist to be effective, and for his/her music to resonate with listeners, “every word [must] feel lived.” The yearning of fans for authentic voices reappears in the modern era of hip-hop as well. Today, a legal case, even a trial for gruesome domestic violence, actually serves as “proof of a young rapper’s reckless abandon [which only] grows his legend and emboldens his authenticity.” In this twisted way, accusations against X are actually invigorating his image and reputation of authenticity within a culture that prioritizes “realness.”
Furthermore, Jenkins articulates the origins of rap as an art form diametrically-opposed to oppressive institutions of authority. For many fans, rap represents the transcendence of poor African-Americans from an American urban experience of “crumbling infrastructure, tightening gang presence, and hyperactive policing.” In the “shadow of government neglect and police misconduct,” generations of African-American hip-hop artists have felt resentful towards American institutions that have continually worked to their disadvantage. As a result, hip-hop has often presented crime as an act of political rebellion rather than something objectionable: criminal activity is “a means of leveling a playing field that always operated on a severe tilt” against African-Americans. Therefore, Jenkins describes that hip-hop allowed for criminal activity to be viewed as a noble act of dissent as opposed to something morally abhorrent. In response to this cultural acceptance of crime as a rebellious act, American social institutions facilitated a strict crackdown on hip-hop in the form of “presidential rebukes, steamrolling CDs [and] obscenity trials.” With greater scrutiny from American society, Jenkins laments that hip-hop fans became siphoned off from any criticism of the music: “To love rap is to crusade for its honor, to suspend disbelief and enjoy it free of moralizing.” In other words, hip-hop culture responded to strict moral scrutiny by divorcing itself entirely from even the possibility of social critique. According to Jenkins, the designation of modern rap as beyond assessment has “allowed decades of talented but abusive men to be celebrated as geniuses while the troublesome aspects of their lives languished in the back pages of history.” If hip-hop is fundamentally separated from moral criticism, then X’s fans who excuse his reprehensible behavior are not necessarily unusual hip-hop fans at all.
Moreover, Amanda Hess describes how the repeated excuse of sexual violence is a consequence of a larger American patriarchy. In the introduction to her article “How the Myth of the Artistic Genius Excuses the Abuse of Women,” she works to establish the inherent gender component of these issues: “Whenever a creative type (usually a man) is accused of mistreating people (usually women), a call arises to prevent those pesky biographical details from sneaking into our assessments of the artist’s work.” Central to her article is the work of historian Martin Jay, who described a phenomenon he called the “aesthetic alibi:” when an artist has an ethical lapse, especially relating to the mistreatment of women, the mythos of artistic genius is right there to step in to excuse him from moral condemnation. In addition to being the most common victims of violence, women also fail to receive the full benefits of the aforementioned mythos of artistic genius, as the “genius” label is rarely “extended to women.”
Hess also argues that the central point of McGrath’s piece — too much biography can spoil one’s ability to appreciate art — is actually an exceedingly privileged position. Far removed from the way men and other privileged communities interpret art, “women and other marginalized audiences are already accustomed to managing the cognitive dissonance of finding meaning in art that ignores us, or worse.” In addition to being most often absolved of their abusive behavior due to their artistic talent, Hess’s piece articulates that men are also most likely to argue in favor of separating the art from the artist. Interestingly, X’s own fans — those who would likely be most willing to separate his music from his actions — were found to be overwhelmingly male. Therefore, the excuse of abusive artists appears to be a fundamentally intra-male and homosocial phenomenon. In his own piece, Jenkins renders his own criticism of patriarchy:
“We owe it to the women who say they’ve been hurt by these artists to stop offering them space in interviews to trash their accusers before everyone gets their day in court….The current climate of simply shoveling more money and clout at rappers with dangerous tendencies and hoping they’ll straighten themselves out is untenable. Labels need to do more training. Fans need to do more soul-searching. We need to ask more questions. Inaction is an action. History is watching.”
Of course, attraction to music — or any art form that aesthetically resonates with viewers or listeners — is largely an emotional and often irrational experience. We can’t always nail down the explicit reasons why we like a painting, laugh at a joke, or play a song repeatedly. Some things just appeal to our sensory experiences without any rhyme or reason. In that regard, it can feel difficult, if not restricting, to abstain from consuming the art made by allegedly-abusive artists. With artists such as X, however, these points fall mute because they assume that the art and the artist are reasonably separable. When X deliberately incorporates into his music the very aspects of his persona that make him controversial, one cannot reasonably distinguish between the art and the artist: the art is the artist. It’s ultimately irrelevant whether or not a listener agrees with what X has to say, or where he puts the blame for his depression. On a deeper level, X’s actions are his music, so the continued consumption of his music subtly implies that the accusations against him are not morally-revolting enough to stop listening altogether. If someone continues to play X’s music, that person is prioritizing their personal aesthetic taste over their own morals, meaning that they, even at the lowest level, find his actions somewhat permissible.
This passivity is no longer acceptable. The idea that X’s fans can feel so emotionally connected to the music that they’re willing to ignore the violent allegations is no longer a good enough excuse. As hip-hop fans, we must critically examine the manner by which we condone the destructive and criminal behavior of the artists we idolize by endorsing a patriarchal hip-hop culture that ignores the experiences of abused women. It’s time for X’s fans to unplug their headphones from his music. I, a former avid listener, will be unplugging mine.
